NLP Emerges From Metaphor (Or So The Story Goes)

© Richard Bolstad

The Painting On The Wall

NLP training not only uses metaphor to teach. NLP, as most of us use it, emerges from a metaphor. Or a collage of metaphors; a collective work of art. This chapter explores some of the implications of that for teaching NLP. Before we start, though, I want to suggest some of the implications we’ll explore. And the best way to do that is with a story. This one is retold by Joseph Campbell….

A Chinese scholar named Chu, so it is said, once went walking with a friend in the mountains of South China. They came upon the ruins of an ancient Taoist temple, in which an old monk now camped. The monk agreed to show them around, and they gazed in awe at the beautiful sculptures and the lifelike paintings up on the temple walls. Chu was particularly enchanted by a mural of a town street, in which a young woman stood, holding flowers. Her hair was down, meaning she was unmarried, and Chu no sooner saw her up there than he was entranced by her beauty. He was so captivated, that he thought little of it when he found himself actually standing in that street in front of her. He introduced himself, and she led him back to her home.

Their love blossomed over the next days, until the two were engaged to be married. The young woman’s hair was put up with enamelled hairpins to signify their engagement, and Chu thought her ever more delightful. However, a few days later, a company of the imperial guard came marching through the town, searching out illegal aliens. The young woman told Chu to hide under the bed, but with all the shouting out on the street, he had to see what was happening. He looked out the window, and felt himself drawn, as if by magic, through it. And suddenly he was back with his friend and the old monk, in the ruins of the temple. Chu turned to the monk expecting an explanation. (from Campbell, 1973, p 127-8)

The problem, as anyone using NLP realises, centres on what explanation to give. You teach an NLP process like a Swish, or a Trauma Process or an Allergy Cure. And your student asks you how it worked. Probably, you tell them an explanation that comes from the collective metaphor of NLP. You explain that submodalities “are the difference that makes the difference” in the brain, or that anchors trigger the reacccessing of memories by classical conditioning.

These explanations can be considered as much a metaphor as when we say “the sun rises”. As the earth spins on it’s orbit, its position in relation to the sun changes, but most people would recognise that “the horizon goes down” was a more realistic description of what happens in the morning. Before we return to our NLP student, we want to clarify just how much of our daily experience involves this type of metaphorical thinking; and just how poorly our explanations of reality fit “the real world”.

Clearing Mental Dead Wood

Gregory Bateson, whose work inspired much of NLP, used the analogy of a man cutting down a tree with an axe (Bateson, 1991, p 164). He points out that in order to swing the axe, the man needs to pay attention to where the last cut was. The cut, it could be said, causes him to swing in a certain place. And each cut could also be said to result from the specific properties of the axe; how heavy it feels, and how well balanced. So the axe, it might be claimed, controls the cut, which controls the man. Actually, of course, Bateson is claiming that the tree-cutting is a system, and that cause and effect descriptions of it may be useful for communication, but have little use scientifically. Even the arbitrary divisions between man, axe and tree merely simplify in ways which suit our communication style. So we can explain the tree-cutting using “scientific” structure, and we can explain it for the purposes of more simple use in human communication (in what Bateson calls “the mental world”). Bateson cautions “One of the main pathologies of psychological and psychiatric thinking is that these two ways of explanation are continuously being crisscrossed, mixed up and confused. We then get a whole mess of nonsense recurring over and over again in psychology, because people will think that the hard-science world should somehow be a part of the mental world, in which there are nothing but mental phenomena.” (1991, p 163)

The situation has more complexity than this though, because Bateson goes on to point out that one cannot really describe the scientific reality anyway, because descriptions only have meaning in contexts. The man’s action with the axe and the tree cannot be understood without knowing, for example, how the man came to cut the tree. If his job involves cutting trees, perhaps he gets told to cut a certain kind of tree, or told to cut at a certain speed. Those things also influence the actions in that man-axe-tree system (which we now need to consider a corporation-supervisor-man-axe-tree system). We could go on forever. In the “mental world” of ordinary human communication, we put a frame around the area we are considering. That frame includes the time we think about (for example, does the man-axe-tree situation begin with the man’s lifting the axe, with the tree growing to a certain shape, or with the cut shaping the trunk) and the spacial area (do we consider the forest, the area of the tree, the area of the cut, or the ecosystem). New mental “realities” result from new frames.

Making Waves

Biochemist Dr Graham Cairns-Smith emphasises this idea of frames with another example. He says (1996, p 17) “Since Newton, we can no longer insist that anything has a clear location. Where is the moon? Out there a quarter of a million miles away? Well, you might say that most of it is out there, but what sense is there in saying that the moon is in one place but has an influence here in raising the tides twice a day, because, oh yes, it has an attached gravitational field. (How is it attached – with stitching?) Is it not better to say, as Faraday did, that material things consist of fields, more intense in some places, less so in others?” So each time you look out at the waves on the ocean or a lake, you see the moon. The moon interpenetrates the waves. It extends, as all things do, across the universe (the field getting gradually weaker further away, but always there). Notice that western science has understood this for 300 years. Quantum theory only added emphasis to the interconnectedness of all that exists. Our usual mental frames were exposed as inadequate metaphors as soon as gravity was defined.

Quantum Physicist David Bohm explored some of the implications of the new physics of Quantum fields in similar terms. He points out that whenever we observe something, in quantum terms we become part of a system with that thing. The observer  becomes part of, and thus influences, the observed. When we look out into the universe, we shape it. “A centrally relevant change in descriptive order required in the quantum theory is thus the dropping of the notion of analysis of the world into relatively autonomous parts, separately existent but in interaction. Rather, the primary emphasis is now on undivided wholeness, in which the observing instrument is not separate from what is observed.” (Bohm, 1980, p134) Our article “NLP: The Quantum Leap” (Bolstad, 1996) explores this more fully.

Words, Words, Words

Unfortunately (or fortunately), this doesn’t seem to worry us. We carry on using the same old metaphors; pretending that the moon has its place far away, and that the man cuts the tree down, and that the sun rises. Paul Watzlawick (1976, p 51-54) quotes a famous experiment demonstrating how this happens. In the experiment, the subject faces a series of 16 pushbuttons in a circle. She or he is asked to press the buttons, and then press the button in the centre of the circle, which will sound a buzzer if they have pressed a “correct” sequence. They are not told what “correct” means; only that, by learning from their results, they will be able to improve their score. At the end of the experiment, the subject is told the truth. The buzzer has been set to sound randomly at first, with spaces where it doesn’t sound at all, and then finally to sound every time. The subjects, invariably, do not believe this. They are convinced that the reason the buzzer sounded more at the end was because they cracked the “system”. They cling to their theory, and believe that the experimenter suffers from delusions.

In the same way, most of us cling, for example, to the old pre-Newtonian delusion that each object in the world has a separate existence. Those who do not, can get into serious social trouble. Studying Paul Watzlawick’s experiment, Gregory Bateson said that he thought it would be interesting to use Schizophrenics as subjects. They would probably abandon the experiment, claiming that the buzzer was sounding meaninglessly, based on a program run by the experimenter from the next room.

Of course, Alfred Korzybski, who first coined the term Neuro-Linguistics in 1933, understood well the problem with our everyday delusions. He said that our maps are never the same as the territory they describe. He takes the example (Korzybski, 1994, p 750) of a map including the cities of Paris, Dresden and Warsaw. He notes that in a useful map, Dresden is given as between Paris and Warsaw, which parallels the relationship that occurs when you drive from one place to the other across the actual territory. At best, a map can contain similar relationships to the territory. Korzybski (1994, p 750-752) points out that words share some characteristics with maps. Words are never equivalent to the actual things or events in the world. The actual events and “things” in the world are part of the territory, and cannot be said to be the same as some map. For example, when I say “This copy of Transforming NLP Training is an interesting collection of essays”, the words “This copy of Transforming NLP Training” refer to an actual thing, and actual things are not “speakable” (ie they cannot be put into words). An actual thing cannot be the same as a map, such as “an interesting collection of essays”. For that reason, he says “The use of the “is” of identity, as applied to objective, un-speakable levels, appears invariably structurally false to facts and must be entirely abandoned. Whatever we might say a happening “is”, it is not.”

The limits of our current languages are many. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980) point out that all language has metaphorical implications. Seemingly innocent comments contain strong metaphors. That last sentence contained three of interest, for example. They are: 1) comments can be found innocent or guilty in a “trial”, 2) metaphors can be weak or strong, like people or structures, and 3) comments have a container-like structure that can hold things. Lakoff and Johnson note that such metaphors structure the unconscious representations we make in order to understand the sentence. They shape our sense of reality. For another example, notice how that last sentence required you to imagine reality as a substance that could be shaped. While these metaphors can be judged useful or not (based on Korzybski’s criterion; does the map actually help you to get from Paris to Warsaw) none of them confine reality. There are no sentences which describe “objective” reality, separate from metaphor (including this one). “What objectivism misses is the fact that understanding, and therefore truth, is necessarily relative to our cultural conceptual systems and that it cannot be framed in any absolute or neutral conceptual system.” (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, p 194) Science itself, according to David Bohm (Bohm and Peat, 1987, p.35) refers to the creative development of metaphors to explain events. “Metaphorical Perception is, indeed, fundamental to all science and involves bringing together previously incompatible ideas in radically new ways.” This is not to say that all metaphors should be accepted. Indeed, some regularly used metaphors seem to us positively harmful. An explanation of an opinion, for instance (like this article) is called an “argument” (as in “Bolstad and Hamblett argue that…”). And arguments are treated as wars (as in “To defend our position…”, “Our strategy has been to target several indefensible claims….”)

New Languages?

Several attempts have been made to reduce the harmful effects of language on our thinking. Here we will consider two. Remember that Korzybski (1994, p 750-752) said “The use of the “is” of identity… appears invariably structurally false to facts and must be entirely abandoned.” David Bourland, Jr. has developed a way of writing in English which actions this, avoiding the use of the verb “to be” (words such as “is”) in this “a = b” way. He calls his new “primed” language E-Prime. For example, rather than saying that “NLP is a metaphor” in my key point in this essay, I would adjust this using E-Prime to say “NLP emerges from a metaphor”, “NLP has a metaphorical quality” or some similar statement. These statements dislodge the illusory sense of equivalence between “NLP” and “a metaphor” in my original claim. NLP Trainer L. Michael Hall has written several books using E-Prime (Hall, 1995, p 269).

David Bohm was also aware of the way that the structures of language shape our very perception of the world. In order to discuss the new understandings of quantum physics, he proposed another radical experiment with our language (Bohm, 1980, p 27-47). He pointed out that normal English is built around the subject-verb-object structure. This implies the existence of two separate things, connected by an action. For example we say “I looked at the tree.” This implies that “I”, and “the tree” exist separately, and are connected by the process of “looking”. This format feels so familiar that we use it even when it clearly does not fit the facts. We say “The light shines into the room” as if “light” was a thing, and “shining” was an action it had a choice about. Actually, light and shining can be best understood as one concept. From a quantum physics point of view, all nouns nominalise events. The word “light” actually nominalises the action of shining. The concept of a “particle” nominalises the wave-movement centred at a particular place.

Not all languages centre round nouns in the way English does. For example in New Zealand Maori, verbs are used more often in situations where English normally uses nouns. If I’m happy, in English I could commonly say “I am fine.” or “I feel good.” In Maori I would more usually say “E pai ana”. “Pai” is a verb meaning “to be agreeable”, and E pai ana means being agreeable, or good-ing. As another example, “E tika ana” means “going correctly”. Where the English speaker might say “That’s right” (as if there exists a “that” to be right) the Maori speaker simply says E tika ana (right-ing is happening).

Bohm’s new linguistic form, which he calls the Rheomode, centers round verbs. Bohm has developed a number of new verbs to better discuss the concepts of quantum physics (which normally produce paradoxes in English). For instance, in the Rheomode, Bohm uses the verb “to ordinate”. Translated into ordinary English, this verb would mean “to create order or oneness” (which implies that there exists a separate “thing” called order or oneness –the existence of such a separate thing would itself seem paradoxical). From his core verb to ordinate, Bohm then generates a family of related verbs, adverbs, verb based nouns etc. These include “to re-ordinate”, which means “to recreate order”, and “ordination”, which Bohm uses as a noun for “the process of creating order”. Re-ordinant is used as an adjective meaning “done in an ordered or unitary way”, and irre-ordinant means “not done in an ordered or unitary way”.

Chaos And Order

You may notice one important difference between the linguistic experiments of E-Prime and the Rheomode. David Bourland intends E-Prime to be used all the time as we speak English. David Bohm considers the Rheomode as a linguistic structure which is useful in some circumstances. Bohm’s view is similar to the view which we take in NLP in relation to the metamodel. In some circumstances we challenge metamodel patterns, and in others we deliberately create them (as the Milton model). Sometimes we want to create “order” (and challenging the metamodel patterns does that), and sometimes we want to create “chaos”. Our language itself prevents us from completely eliminating metamodel patterns from our speech. In fact, all we can do is identify which patterns we will “choose” to use.

Ernest Rossi (1996) suggests that these two categories (order and chaos) are related to the functional style of the conscious and the unconscious mind. The new science of chaos has shown that turbulent, chaotic events may be unpredictable, and yet have a hidden order, as we saw in Chapter Three. The growth of any plant is an example. We know that the plant is shaped by the order of its DNA, and yet we cannot predict exactly how it will grow. No two plants ever grow exactly the same leaves or roots. One of Milton Erickson’s therapeutic tasks was to require a person to search an area of grass for two leaves that were identical. None can be found. Nature generates such non-linear, or “chaotic” systems. The human mind is an example. Rossi says (1996, p 69) “Consciousness has the Herculean task of remapping, transducing, transforming or reframing, if you will, the natural nonlinear dynamics of our unconscious physical and biological nature into the linear, rational and at least somewhat more predictable dynamics of our subjective experience.” Rossi holds that both styles of functioning have their place, and a healthy person cycles through periods of chaotic daydreaming and periods of ordered, rational planning several times each day.

David Bohm also believes that both Rheomode and normal thinking are useful. In everyday “rational” thinking we can treat things as if they are separate. We can talk using normal English about “cause and effect” relations between things. “Thus we can, in specified contexts, adopt other various forms of insight that enable us to simplify certain things and to treat them momentarily and for certain limited purposes as if they were autonomous and stable, as well as perhaps separately existent. Yet we do not have to fall into the trap of looking at ourselves and at the whole world in this way.” (Bohm, 1980, p 11-12). Bohm refers to these as two types of order: the deeper “implicate” order of quantum physics, and the simplified “explicate” order of daily life, which we “condense out” from that. He describes the implicate order as related to chaos and to the “internal mental processes” (feelings and other sensory representations). Bohm observes that explicate “fixed” concepts emerge out of these internal mental processes. (Bohm and Peat, 1987, p 172-190) He describes the ability to experience the implicate order as the source of “creativity”. An example might be looking at a crowd of people, feeling ones response to that scene, and simply accepting all this as a sensory experience. An artist needs to access experience in this manner. On the other hand, looking at the crowd and recognising a face you have seen years before involves making the form of that face explicate. Both are useful.

Learning Stages

Bohm and Rossi agree that consciously ordered and “chunked down” explanations have value in certain situations. Rossi points out that they “remap” reality in order to make it more predictable. Bohm describes them as the basis of re-cognition (thinking again about something). Such skills form an important part (though only part) of learning. In the last chapter we discussed Maslow’s model of learning stages. Maslow describes learning as having four steps: unconsciously unskilled, consciously unskilled, consciously skilled and unconsciously skilled. In this model, conscious awareness is a “tool” which the mind applies in order to get from being unconsciously unskilled to being unconsciously skilled.

The conscious, thinking mind can only pay attention to a few (7 plus or minus 2) chunks of information, whereas the unconscious can respond to the whole situation. Conscious thinking, by itself, is limited in scope. Most daily tasks can be more smoothly completed once they are unconsciously run. For example, riding a bicycle takes enormous concentration to do consciously. It makes sense to leave it to the unconscious once that is possible. But conscious thinking is useful. It may help to identify and practise specific changes you want to make, and that in turn enables you to achieve unconscious action. 

Back To The Future Of NLP

So now, finally, let’s come back to the NLP student who asks you how it all works. You know that “man, axe and tree” interrelate in the one system, and so do “NLP Practitioner, client and technique”. You know that the system can be described in any frame, but that ultimately all things are connected, and even that all things (like the moon) are everywhere. You know that any map you give is not the territory of what happened, and can at best have similar relationships to the territory. You know that the sentences you use will inevitably contain both metamodel patterns and culturally accepted hidden metaphors. You know that any order the person’s conscious mind creates to understand this reality will not do justice to the non-linear “chaos” of their unconscious experience. What will you tell them?

You will tell them a metaphor, because that’s what language enables you to do. Science itself contains only what are considered useful metaphors, as David Bohm says. And to the extent that your metaphors approximate reality, they will be useful.

The Frayed Edges of NLP

NLP sometimes presents itself as the science behind metaphors: the science which this chapter aims to discuss (call it NLP epistemology if you like). And sometimes NLP presents itself as simply a new series of metaphors. We believe that both are useful. We just need to be clear in which sense we are using the term “NLP”. To use Bohm’s terminology, we might say that in the first sense (NLP as a metascience) “NLP” is being used implicately, and in the second sense (NLP as metaphor) it is being used explicately. Both Bandler and Grinder have referred to NLP as a metascience, Bandler describes it as an attitude (of “Go for it!”), a methodology (modelling) and a set of techniques that have resulted from these (Bandler, 1993, p 14). Grinder says “NLP is a meta-discipline which focuses on the discovery and coding of patterns which distinguish the most capable of the practitioners of some particular discipline (managerial practice, medical practice, sports, therapy…) from the average practitioner. These distinguishing patterns are the substance of NLP.” (John Grinder, letter to NZANLP, 1998).

Explicate NLP refers to the trail of techniques, or the distinguishing patterns which have been coded. Several writers have drawn attention to the flaws in explicate NLP. L. Michael Hall has challenged the notions of anchoring and submodality shifts, for example. He says we cannot anchor “metastates” such as self esteem, using visual, auditory or kinesthetic anchors (by themselves). (Hall, 1996, p 53). Nor can we change meta-states such as beliefs with a submodality shift by itself (Hall, 1998, p 33). Wyatt Woodsmall has challenged several NLP presuppositions and the notion of reframing (Woodsmall, 1996). He says reframing violates the basic premises of systems theory and thus cannot (by itself) work. Mark McKergow and Jenny Clarke (1996) say on the other hand that Time Line Therapy® and Meta-state models simply create new ways of explaining what actually occurs when you access and change internal representations. Aiming to preserve the clarity of what we would call “Implicate NLP”, John Grinder says that any intervention which is based on information about the content of the person’s dilemma (such as values elicitation and changing) cannot, by definition, be NLP (personal communication, June, 1998).

I can myself identify several flaws in the curriculum I teach at NLP Certifications. Consider the whole notion of the separation between process (form) and content (Dilts, Grinder, Bandler and Delozier, 1980, p 106). Process (form) and content can be compared to wave form and particle in physics. They can be separated only by our perception. Consider the “process” of dissociation, as used in the trauma cure. “Dissociated” and “associated” are thought of in NLP as two ways of processing the same content. However, the content of a person’s internal pictures is inevitably changed between the time when they are dissociated and when they are associated. The content of dissociated pictures usually includes a representation of the person themselves. Dissociation changes the content. If we found that routinely placing a picture of a fish in clients images cured their anxiety, we would be excited; but we could hardly claim that this was a “content-free” procedure.

This gets more puzzling when we consider sensory accessing cues. We “know” that the “visual recall” eye position accesses images as we have seen them before, and visual construct accesses images “the person has never seen before” (Dilts, Grinder, Bandler and Delozier, 1980, p 80). Thus, for example, after we do a dissociation process, we would expect the person’s image to be now made by visual construct. And yet we also know that the “original” image which the person recalled when they “recalled” the memory hadchanged from the way it was when they saw it in real life. The original associated traumatic memories tend to be larger size, they tend to be organised differently in time (so that the traumatic part of the memory gets more “screen time”) etc. There are, in this sense no such things as recalled memories. All memories are constructed because memory is an active synthetic process.

Each of these examples reminds us that explicate NLP is only a series of metaphors, maps or approximations to reality.

Adding To The Confusion

From time to time, someone who has been modelling a system of thought, using the framework of NLP, reverses the process and begins to attempt to reshape NLP using the other system of thought. We have done it in this chapter, for example by introducing chaos theory as a way of  clarifying the nature of the unconscious mind. Such transfusions of external concepts have delivered enormous advantage to NLP, enriching it repeatedly. An example might be the introduction of the TOTE model to NLP. In a separate article, I have expressed concern about the way in which we assess such expansions of our repertoire. That article (Bolstad, 1998) focuses on a more recent “introject” into NLP: the Levels of Psychological Existence Theory, proposed by Clare W. Graves and also called Spiral Dynamics (Beck and Cowan, 1996).

In this case, some adherents of  Spiral Dynamics have suggested that their model of the evolution of values throughout human history should be considered not as a map but as a factual description of “what is”. Graves held the belief that his system was referring to a real biological distinction within the human being, and claimed that his values systems or ^VMEMEs “… reflect different activation levels of our dynamic neurological equipment, ie, our brains’ wetware, complex cell assemblages, and billions of potential neuron connections. ‘As man solves the problems of existence at a level,’ Graves contended, ‘new brain systems may be activated and, when activated, change his perceptions so as to cause him to see new problems of existence.’ Instead of beginning only as passive hardware without content (Locke’s tabula rasa or blank slate view), it turns out the normal human brain comes with potential ‘software’-like systems just waiting to be turned on -latent upgrades!” (Beck and Cowan, 1996, p51).

Presenting themselves as if “outside history” the developers of spiral dynamics then discuss what is “good” or “bad”, “proper” or “improper” in each value system listed by them, never noticing that these judgements themselves beg the NLP metamodel question “according to whom”. We are then told (Beck and Cowan, 1996, p279) “If the situation calls for authoritarianism, then it is proper to be an authoritarian; and if the situation calls for democracy, one should be democratic. ‘Good authority’ that sets necessary limits is a lost art in many families and schools, having been confused with punitiveness, regimentation and rigidity. At the same time, ‘democracy’ has almost been deified as the definitive, universal end-state model for decision-making, whether the active ^VMEMEs in a group can handle it or not.”

The notion that we can decide whether a group of people are “ready” to be permitted democracy embodies a kind of thinking very different to NLP. Historically, this kind of thinking has been dangerous to the world community. So has the idea that one categorisation of human beings (the Graves spiral) is a “factual” expression of the “wetware” of the brain, and therefore supercedes all other ways of understanding human beings. To us, this raises very serious concerns about the use of the Graves model inside NLP. We are sure that the Graves model, like any map, can add useful new perspectives to our actions. We are equally sure that any map which is confused with the countryside ceases to be useful, and becomes a barrier to learning. The strength of NLP, we believe, resides in the intellectual humility which “The map is not the territory” can give us.

NLP: Inside History

The history of NLP itself is a reminder that “the map is not the territory” (Clancy and Yorkshire, 1989; Merlevede, 1998, McClendon, 1989; Woodsmall, 1997). The 1970s was the decade of NLP’s emergence. Richard Bandler was a fourth year student in Dr John Grinder’s linguistics class at the University of California in Santa Cruz, in 1972 when the development of NLP began. The richness of NLP owes much to the network of people that this association focused. Their network of professional contacts, whose ideas contributed to the development of NLP, included:

• Virginia Satir (the family therapist from whom Bandler initially developed the language patterns that became the metamodel),
• Gregory Bateson (systems theorist and psychotherapist, whose partner Margaret Mead had studied trancework with Dr Milton Erickson),
• George Miller  (the theorist who proposed the TOTE model for strategies),
• Noam Chomsky (linguist),
• Robert Spitzer (head of Science and Behaviour Books, who edited Fritz Perls’ work for publication).

Grinder and Bandler’s friends in the initial NLP group included Judith DeLozier (at that time partnered with John Grinder), Robert Dilts, Leslie Cameron (at that time partnered with Richard), David Gordon, Mary Beth Megus, Terry McClendon and others. The Structure of Magic Volume I was the first book jointly published by Bandler and Grinder, in 1975. Richard Bandler set up a company named Not Limited, and John Grinder had a company named Unlimited Limited. Leslie Cameron organised the first NLP Association, called the “Not Limited Division of Training and Research” in 1978. The first “NLP” trainings were ten day NLP Programmer trainings run in 1978. That year John O. Stevens and Connirae Andreas, former Gestalt therapists, began editing John Grinder and Richard Bandler’s books.

Differences emerged fairly early in the history of NLP, and were a theme of the second decade of NLP’s history (the 1980s). Grinder and Bandler’s companies formed a partnership to set up the Society of NLP in 1979. When this arrangement did not work out, Bandler took Grinder to court for breach of contract. In the resulting case, Bandler bought out Grinder’s share of their new Society of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, and (according to Bandler) Grinder agreed to stop formally teaching “NLP” by 1991. Grinder and Delozier formed Grinder DeLozier and Associates, announcing in 1987 that they had developed a “New Code” of NLP based on models such as the Precision model and the new concept of perceptual positions. Now partnered with Michael Lebeau, Leslie Cameron set up an organisation with him and David Gordon (Neuro-Linguistic Programming for Advanced Studies). In 1985, Bandler produced Magic In Action the book that introduced submodality work to the world.

The 1990s saw two major trends in NLP community organisation. One was the formation of international associations. In 1990, an attempt was made to establish a more inclusive international NLP organisation than the Society of NLP (owned by Bandler). This attempt was focused in the International Association for NLP, a name assumed by the American National Association of NLP, which had set Practitioner, Master Practitioner and Trainer standards in 1982. The IANLP collapsed in 1994, was re-established in 1995-1996 by René Pfalzgraf, and was “reincarnated” as the International NLP Association by Peter Keane and others in 1999. Several other NLP certifying organisations and NLP community voices were by then in existence, including the International NLP Trainers Association (set up by Wyatt Woodsmall and others in 1994), the American Board of NLP (Set up by Tad James and others in 1998), the Institute of Neuro-Semantics (set up by Michael Hall and others in 1998), and the NLP Community Leadership Project (set up by Robert Dilts, Teresa Epstein, Tim Halbom, Suzi Smith and others in 1997).  This is not to mention those NLP trainers (such as Tony Robbins, who trained with Grinder, Woodsmall and others in 1983-1984) who broke away from the official use of the term “NLP” to form other fields using similar technology.

The other theme of NLP’s internal history in the 1990s was the struggle over “ownership” of NLP. An attempt was made by Richard Bandler to enforce a trademark for NLP in 1990 in the USA, along with a claim against IANLP and others for wrongfully teaching NLP. Bandler’s case was rejected by the court. A trade mark for NLP was first registered in Britain in October 1996 by TV hypnotist Paul McKenna’s training company McKenna Breen Limited. McKenna Breen Limited transferred it to Richard Bandler for £1 in May 1997. Richard and Paul were now running a training they called “New NLP”, and were highly critical of “old NLP”. The next year NLP Master Practitioner and corporate trainer Tony Clarkson won a court case overturning their trademark. NLP in both Britain and the USA has been established as public domain. In 1998, Richard Bandler took John Grinder to court for running an NLP training at NLP Comprehensive, Boulder Colorado, in 1991, after the expiry of his right to do so (by their previous agreement). Grinder and NLP Comprehensive settled out of court in January 2000. A concurrent attempt by Bandler to have NLP recognised as his intellectual property was ruled out by a summary judgement of the court in May 1999.

Clearly, there is no one map of NLP. What is most impressive about this history is not the divisions; those are common in fields such as psychology, psychotherapy and even linguistics. What is impressive is that, even today, NLP is a recognisable field. Someone who has done an NLP Practitioner training anywhere in the world will have shared most of the learnings that any other NLP Practitioner has. And the NLP community shows a remarkable ability to incorporate different perspectives into a shared collection of understandings. The principle that “The map is not the territory” has, to a remarkable extent, ensured the flexibility of NLP.

Which Doctor?

In suggesting that there is no one true map of NLP, we’re not saying that “any metaphor is just as good as any other”. We view some maps with real concern, particularly maps that claim they “are the territory”. We value some maps, including the original maps of NLP. The explicate theory of NLP has “frayed areas”; but so do all explicate theories. All these challenges need to do is remind us that no map is the territory. Even if Hall, Woodsmall, Grinder and I are right in our challenges to standard NLP training, this does not need to prevent us using our frayed maps with clients and students. The poor maps of NLP may indeed approximate reality better than other maps which that would thrust us back on. And maps are useful. Our discussion of the stages of learning (above) demonstrates one reason why. Simplified maps can often give useful approximations to new learners.

The work of New Zealand energy healer Clif Sanderson illustrates another reason why the metaphors or maps of explicate NLP are useful. Sanderson has spent 20 years practising what he calls intentional healing around the world. In his book  “Making Outrageous Claims” he documents the results of five separate research projects on his work in the Soviet Republics, mainly with the children who are survivors of Chernobyl. After his work with them, the number of children with immune system deficits dropped from 4.17% to 0%. The number of children with high level radiation in their urine dropped from 38.89% to 9.09%. All of the children reported losing the 24 hour migraine headaches they had suffered. Sanderson says of these changes “This is simply accomplished by the unfettered intentions of the “healer” placing him or herself in close proximity with the seeker and allowing expansion of being to recognise the all pervading, infinitely present universal unity. It may, after all, be simple unencumbered love.” This reads as a fairly “implicate” description of his work.

In his audiotape “The Witchdoctor’s Wisdom Clinic”, Sanderson reveals more of his model. Accused by a local reporter of being a “witchdoctor” he says “Well I haven’t quite taken to wearing the paint and the feathers yet. But you see, the other thing that they knew by doing that is that they become exotic to the people they’re working with. If we look at the tribal history then, these men (and in some cases women also) grew up with their siblings and others going to the same school, shall we say; but at some stage they were selected or chose to become witchdoctors or the bearers of the spiritual knowledge of the tribe. And they then became separated. They lived in huts outside the village; they painted themselves exotically; so that the mind of the patient when coming for a consultation was unable to grasp who they were and put them into a little, careful pocket. And I think that’s one of the most powerful things about healing: is to be exotic to the person you’re working with so there is space for transition…. I often use some Tibetan words and some of the Maori words that I was authorised to use, because the person won’t know the meaning of them. And so it isn’t the content of the chant (or it may sound like a prayer) but its that it again unlocks the mind from being able to assess who and what I am and what I’m doing.”

Sanderson concludes that the source of his success “may after all be simple unencumbered love.” (1993, p 19)

Explicate NLP may also be achieving some of its effect as a result of  witchdoctoring. It may simply be one more way to express the love that creates all life. It may be constructed entirely on metaphor. But so is all thought. The fact is that NLP applications may produce the desired changes in spite of, or even as a result of this truth.

I think the ancient Taoists understood this. “Visions are born and die in those who behold them.” Said the old monk simply, explaining Chu’s experience with the woman in the painting. And he raised his eyes to look again at the mural on the temple wall. Chu looked up at the beautiful young woman; her hair so carefully pinned up with the enamelled hair pins.

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Richard Bolstad

Transformations International Consulting & Training Ltd, learn@transformations.org.nz